March of the Damnaged

Our taste in music often plays a large part in how we identify as individuals. The way we dress, or styles of dance we prefer, are sometimes the result of our love for a certain musical genre. I certainly have a deep connection with many types of music, but the strongest by far, is to the mechanical, industrial rhythms of Nine Inch Nails. Every compilation is a brutal symphony assembled of thrashing guitars, static, and disembodied screams that decrescendo to delicate melodies of softly plucked strings and gently depressed keys. Its Trent Reznor’s distorted emotion that drives my fanaticism, the waveforms he creates are but merely the conveyor belt, to transport my mind’s eye to the twisted world of an addict’s inward reflection on life at the point of “[a] needle in the vein.” Through Reznor’s lamentation: reveled are the invisible bonds that bind us to the pulling shreds of our decaying selves, dragging us into the grinding gears of despondency –disfiguring – disemboweling. Painfully suggested to our auditory sense is the duality of humanity’s squandered potential, like “the bullet in the gun,” we are capable of righteous acts of compassion, or seething deeds of destruction, a line so easily crossed by unfocused operation, or improper alignment. Reznor constructs the image of “Mr. Self Destruct” as a reflection of ourselves, and prefabricates our expectations for the remainder of a guided journey down the Spiral.

“Mr.Self Destruct” immediately begins to build a heavy metallic tempo, playing to the repetitive nature of our species, stating, “I am the voice inside your head” and enumerating each subsequent instance of human folly with “I control you.” The voice listeners are subjected to, fabricates evidence in testimony to the ways we follow its instructions, leading us inexorably to tragically confounded ends. We are tempted to be convinced that life is but a horrible conglomeration of suffering and sadness. The only way to alleviate our subjugation to the trepidations of life’s lesser heights: give in to the constant whirring of temptation, and let the voice “…take [us] were [we] want to go.”